Developed in conversation with curator Sarah Sarofim. Exhibition design: Rowaa Ibrahim. Poster and print design: Sherine Salla. Installation assistance: Hamada and Khaled Khalifa. Public programme with Farida Gohar, Hoda Marwan and Ali El Adawy. Photography: Marc Onsi. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Loudspeaker and the Tower at ARDCairo, 2025 Six years after the work was first shown in Toronto and Saskatoon, The Loudspeaker and the Tower returned to the city that produced its architectures and its stories. This was its first presentation in Egypt.
Cairo changed the exhibition. A new video installation, Letters from Distant Orbits, opened the show and became its emotional center. Addressed to my late mother, it was woven from interiors, khayamiya, recordings of women Qur'an reciters whose voices were increasingly excluded from public religious life, and Sufi modes of embodied listening drawn from my own archive, layering a daughter's grief against a wider grief for a city under constant demolition, a register the work had not carried before.
I installed it inside a ferasha, the wooden-framed, khayamiya-covered structure raised in Cairo streets for funerals and Sufi festivals, with seating borrowed from the same context. Viewers sat in a posture of waiting and attention closer to ritual than to gallery-going.
Nearby, The Parrot was reworked from its earlier performance-video version into a still photograph and sound piece of microphone interference and speaker glitches: a woman mimicking and transforming the gestures of the sermon, drawing on the parrot's place in Sufi tales and the 1001 Nights as mimic and truth-teller.
Ring Road Carousel Day Drive, a new series of daytime photographs of newer Ring Road mosques, broke deliberately from the night-only imagery the project had held to until then. Around these, the metal tower, the night-drive zoetrope and the scattered loudspeakers made a nocturnal field of sound and light, where sermons, Sufi chants, static and the spectral traces of women reciters coexisted in near darkness.
The exhibition was accompanied by a public program developed with curator Sarah Sarofim: a collage-writing and sound workshop, Grids, Ghosts, and Glitches, and a screening and conversation, Construction as Film: Brick by Brick. At the finissage, the sound work made in the workshop was played back through the speaker built into the Tower sculpture itself.
Developed in conversation with curator Sarah Sarofim. Exhibition design: Rowaa Ibrahim. Poster and print design: Sherine Salla. Installation assistance: Hamada and Khaled Khalifa. Public programme with Farida Gohar, Hoda Marwan and Ali El Adawy. Photography: Marc Onsi. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.